Your Own Website? Why Not?
by John McDonnell
Have you ever wanted to get yourself on the internet and own your own website. Well lucky for you it's actually not that hard at all. You may have been scared off by not knowing the difference from HTML and CSS and Javascript but you won't have to worry about that if you use a Content Management System or a “CMS.” A CMS does all the hard work for you and simply leaves putting the content into the website to you so you can publish your blogs or even set up a simple little online shop if your feeling entrepreneurial. One of the most popular CMS's out there today is Wordpress. You've probably not even realised you've visited hundreds of Wordpress sites over the past few years and the best thing about it is that a child could set up a very nice site using Wordpress in a couple of minutes. Oh did I mention it's free! What's not to love about that.
You can download Wordpress from http://wordpress.com/ and set it up on a web server yourself or if you want it to be even easier you can set up a site directly from Wordpress themselves. The good guys over there offer free storage space and give you an address “MyWebsite”.wordpress.com that you can access from any browser just like any other website on the internet and from there it's very easy to configure a whole site out due to the fact that people all around the word make “plugins” for free that you can use to add a Twitter stream, a link to your Facebook page, photo galleries, shops and basically anything else you could ever want in a website and most of it is free. These plugins can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. At the time of writing there's over 21,000 plugins available so if you can't find what you want your just generally a very unlucky person. To install them it's pretty much a one or two click process so no need to worry about not being computer savy. Fully customisable themes and everything else are also included for free so you can make your site look as good as you want.
However if your feeling a wee bit more adventurous you could buy yourself your own domain name and find a web server to host your website on yourself. Most colleges have a computer/networking society and they offer free storage space for members so get in contact with your college's society and hopefully some friendly person will help you out setting your site up. Once again it's very easy to do and once the wordpress files are uploaded. Domain names usually cost less than €10 for a .com address and is well worth the investment if you really want to put yourself out there on the internet.
Like I said all this can be done for free if you just go with a wordpress hosted site and it's still very cheap if you want your own web address so it's well worth putting an evening in messing around instead of watching soaps and see what you can make for yourself. Who knows your website could turn into the next Huffington Post or TMZ or even better yet – the next CollegeTimes.